How DJCF Modernized Grant Payments & Freed Its Team from the Back Office

The Dallas Jewish Community Foundation has been a cornerstone of philanthropic life in North Texas for more than 50 years. With over $450 million in assets under management, DJCF distributes approximately $41 million annually — 100% of it donor-directed, spanning roughly 5,000 grants per year to nonprofits across the region. A staff of ten manages all of it.

Megan Hyman came to DJCF after 15 years in JP Morgan’s private wealth division, working closely with multigenerational families on legacy and philanthropic planning. That background gave her an especially sharp eye for payment risk. When she arrived and examined how DJCF was processing grants, she described the experience as arriving to find herself in an Oregon Trail situation — loading all her belongings onto a covered wagon in a world that had moved on.

The Problem

Three of the foundation’s ten staff members were tied up in a multi-day disbursement cycle each period:

Grant requests came in by phone and fax, or hand-delivered on paper to the office
Each grantee’s 501(c)(3) status had to be manually vetted
Checks were printed on a machine rented specifically for that purpose, bundled with letters, and physically driven to the post office.

One employee spent roughly 25% of their time tracking down nonprofits whose checks had gone uncashed — organizations that had moved, changed banking setups, or simply never notified DJCF. Checks sometimes sat uncleared for 60 to 90 days, forcing the foundation to hold more cash on hand than it otherwise would have. During COVID, payment staff were classified as essential workers and brought into the office for the essential work of processing grant payments.

Moving to electronic payments seemed like the obvious fix, but introduced its own risks. Most grants management platforms make it easy for community foundations to store grantee banking details directly in their system. The appeal is clear: faster payments, fewer checks, no post office runs. But Megan, with 15 years of AML and KYC experience at JP Morgan, saw the exposure immediately.

A grants management platform is not a regulated financial institution. If it gets hacked, a question of when and not if, every nonprofit’s banking details are exposed. Storing that data in a non-bank platform was a risk DJCF wasn’t willing to take.

For community foundations, there’s a deep instinct to own every step of this process. It feels like stewardship — like you owe it to your fund holders to be personally accountable for every grant that goes out the door. But what that looked like in practice at DJCF was staff tied up managing payment exceptions instead of fund holder relationships. Every uncashed check, every returned envelope, every confused call from a grantee landed back on the same team responsible for helping donors think through estate plans and legacy gifts. And those donors — the fund holders DJCF was working so hard to serve — were experiencing slower grants, more administrative friction, and less proactive outreach than they deserved.

With a board mandate to modernize and fund holders demanding better, the pressure to find a real solution was clear.

The Solution

DJCF arrived at Chariot after trying the obvious alternatives. When Megan joined in 2022, the foundation was at 0% electronic payments — every grant went out as a check. A bank-sponsored invoice payment vendor pushed that to roughly 35% electronic payments, but stalled there. The system was built for paying vendors, not sending grants: there was no way to attach the grant letter to the payment, so money would arrive in a nonprofit’s account days before any explanation of what it was for. Grantees called DJCF confused. Exceptions multiplied. The team that had hoped to get off the treadmill found themselves on a faster one.

With Chariot Disbursements, DJCF consolidated two separate workflows — checks and electronic — into one. And the security question was central to why.

How Chariot works for DJCF:

One unified workflow — Whether a grantee receives funds electronically or by check, DJCF manages a single process. If a nonprofit hasn’t enrolled with Chariot, Chariot still sends the check and automatically generates the grant letter — no separate workflow to manage.
Bank-grade identity and authority verification — Chariot goes well beyond routing number checks. They verify that the individual submitting banking details is a legitimate, authorized officer of the organization — confirmed against IRS data — then create and actively monitor a dedicated deposit account for that grantee. Verified accounts are shared across Chariot’s network, so DJCF benefits when another grantmaker has already verified a nonprofit they’re paying for the first time. Additionally, DJCF doesn’t need to store any sensitive financial details themselves.
Exception handling — Chariot conducts automatic follow-ups on failed payments, address issues, and re-issues — customer support loads taken entirely off DJCF’s plate.
Ongoing nonprofit support — Chariot supports grantees through claiming their accounts and beyond. Because money and grant details arrive together, nonprofits always know what they received and why — dramatically reducing confused inbound calls to DJCF.
Seamless fund holder experience - Fund holders didn’t need to do anything differently. That’s intentional: nothing changes for the fund holder, except that their grants move faster and more securely.

92%
Of all grantmaking now processed electronically (as of Mar 2026)
Same Day
Nonprofits now receive funds to their Chariot account on the same-day (compared to previously up to 90 days)

The impact showed up in places Megan hadn’t entirely anticipated.

Fund Holder Experience

For fund holders, payment speed had become something they could feel.

“People get really excited that it’s going to feel just like they personally delivered that check to their grantee organization,” Megan says, “because within a matter of hours after we approve it, the grantee organization gets an alert they have received those funds.”

That difference showed up in a recent donor conversation: when a prospective fund holder asked whether nonprofits would get their money the same day rather than waiting two weeks, Megan could say yes. What started as an infrastructure decision had become a front-line differentiator.

Operational Resilience

When a severe Texas winter storm brought the state to a halt, DJCF’s operations continued uninterrupted — every staff member worked from home, no grants delayed. A direct contrast to COVID, when payment staff were required in the office.

The speed shows up in mission-critical moments, too. When catastrophic flooding hit central Texas over Fourth of July weekend, DJCF was able to move funds through its network of partner community foundations within hours.

“We were able to transfer funds to the right places within a matter of hours.”

Getting resources to the people best positioned to deploy them, as fast as possible, is now part of how DJCF fulfills its mission.

From 3 Days / Week to a Few Hours

A grant cycle that had consumed three days each week was whittled down to a few hours.

“Those same people are now even more critical and even more central to the relationships that we have with our fund holders,” Megan says, “because they’re able to devote that time previously spent to pushing paper to now really elevating the stewardship we provide.”

DJCF’s staff began making proactive calls — noticing when a fund holder hadn’t granted in months, flagging undeployed stock donations, reaching out just to say thank you. One seven-figure fund holder told Megan that someone had called to check in. “That hasn’t happened in 20 years of me having a fund here,” the donor said.

Unique Offering Advantage

Today, DJCF uses Chariot as a selling point when fund holders are weighing a community foundation against a national DAF sponsor.

The pitch is simple: white-glove service and local relationships, backed by the same payment infrastructure as the largest financial institutions.

Advice to the Field

On Security

Megan estimates she’s fielding one to two calls per week from leaders at other DAF programs asking about Chariot. Her message is consistent, and it starts with risk.

“A lot of people do not appreciate or understand the level of risk they’re taking when they retain ACH information for third-party organizations,” she says. “Once I walk them through what a breach actually means — not just for you, but for every nonprofit you pay and every other organization that also pays that nonprofit — people get it fast.”

For foundation leaders who came up through banking or finance, the exposure is immediately legible. For those who haven’t, the conversation is often a wake-up call.

It’s not hypothetical: check and ACH fraud has been roughly doubling every two years, and major DAF sponsors are beginning to require electronic payment enrollment — meaning foundations that haven’t helped their grantees get there risk those nonprofits losing funding from the largest sources in the space.

On Better Stewardship

Think carefully about what your staff could actually do if they weren’t managing payment exceptions.

“We had people dedicated to following up on uncashed checks, reissuing payments, chasing down address issues. That’s not nothing — that’s full-time capacity. When you free that up, you can show up to your donors and your grantees in a completely different way."

At DJCF, that freed capacity went toward proactive fund holder outreach — including calls that hadn't happened in 20 years.

On Competitive Advantage

Her third point is for leaders worried about internal buy-in: get your board aligned on modernization as a competitive mandate, not just an operational one. DJCF's board had approved a strategic plan with an explicit mandate to modernize. With five other community foundations operating prominently in the Dallas-Fort Worth market, the board was clear: DJCF needed to be a pioneer, not a follower.

“Even though we are very mom and pop and local and white glove in our approach, we’re also at the forefront of innovation.”

Interested in how Chariot Disbursements could modernize your grant payment process? Talk to our team.